@geo_c my experience is a ROX panel(/tray, using interchangably) is a very basic screen-long app bar. I've tried those but prefer the format of JWM 2nd trays.
You're 64-bit so old machines are probably not so important to you, but you can get 2nd trays in Tahr with a newer version of JWMDesk (though oddly they do not work vertically left-right in Tahr).
Once setup I hide them, and once there, as of today, there's nothing on the JWM desktop but Xlock and Trash. Trash is there because that's how it works. Xlock stays for its right-click menu. Access to media is a tray ROX folder with symlinks to common partitions and system folders. XFCE is similar but with mounting partition file managers, and it's much easier to configure. E.g., I've never looked at an XFCE tray config file because the gui does the job.
I'm in an XFCE with taken a&ydrv, so I have to remaster it for live use.
One of the critera I use for pup quality is how close it is to usability at first boot, and for both 32/64, it's an XFCE puplet. I take this to mean it's not Puppy but the WM and the experienced hands making puplets usable for others. If they want more users, making such distros official is a primary means. The styled Mainline pups look good, but I have only seen one user here who leaves them alone, and once customized they look radically different.
What looks the same? Great backgrounds. In X-Tahr I use the new +D XFCE background. I might start using 64 Bionic's mountain in Xenial.
The remastering scripts I use tend to omit files, so I have to add them to a new adrv... or remaster again for manual addition, and of course with each new 'final' you realize more changes.
Something I have not settled on is how to run browsers, the very basic thing everyone does.
If we run live, there is no default media attached. If we do not load browsers into ram, they need to be both accessed from external media and given a user-interface way of running them.
Literally what I do now is dig through scripts on external media and right-click to run them in terminal... and the scripts are continuously evolving. I change something daily. As such, no one sitting down at my computer could run basic browsers on it without being one of us and told how it is setup.
Sure I could change the traditional Puppy layout to browser launcher icons, but the effort is about that not being the goal.
What I really want is to make my system consistent and user-friendly for myself.
What I've really been jazzed about since yesterday is using wmctrl to put a one icon sized ROX window on the desktop containing all my launchers, the directory I used to dedicate as a
faux panel strip but now is used as a variable icon on the desktop.
That sounds cool.
I am drawn to new ideas but I should probably keep on a simplicity track.
I use ROX and XFE, and those are perhaps the only applications displaying drive icons that would concern me.
I would probably only use those two in JWM also if I did not need partition mounting, which in any pup appears to be a hack or a puplet. It is wasteful to use LxPup in JWM just to mount partitions in a file manager, but that is what I do.
In ROX I display unmounted drives with a directory icon
The system seems to handle mounted partition icons automatically, thankfully. The issue seems to be seeing them where you want them instead of the /mnt folder (or /media as I have been seeing in newer 32).
My ROX icons apart from directories are basically bright colors for dark themes
Most of your icons I see are your custom glowing set.
And the singular vision you often talk about probably comes from trying many things and always going back to something that works for me to look at for long periods of time
Vision is very important for artists and inventors.
Barry has OS vision. You have a unique desktop vision. I have waxing and waning ideas that never fit into a grand scheme.
I could look at Linux customization as hobby, but it's not the healthiest thing I could be doing. I'm learning, but not as much as I could be focused. It's better than watching TV or playing video games, I'll cede that. Who has the time?
When I decided to cut over from a cyan type look to console green, it was a big change
I am doing both. Cyan is a great highlight color and greens are a nice break from blue normalcy. I was trying to use an orange highlight on my Lx desktop, but fell back to a full green & grey scheme. There's the idea... then what works. Mood and boredom are factors.
I'll be doing a lot of scoring in Musescore. I did some more work with Ardour.
Musescore got my hopes up but it looked very score-oriented to me instead of a squencer that features score editing. The soundfont tool didn't seem quite right.
If you can do it professionally, I could learn it, but I will probably just stick with my old Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 until I can't find hardware to run it on. That is probably the reason I still care about my old, slow 32-bit machines.
If you can write flying car music, more power to you. I am expecting the electric car revolution to surge ahead.
